"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment particularly broke the Show HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Oh, wow. I thought you were just another HN hater, but nope. I think my eyes are bleeding.

I took a picture of a box of pens, snatched the hex values from it, and then threw them directly onto the page. I'm glad you like it!

I like the cut of your jib sir.

Its actually quite readable in eww, the emacs web browser :^)

The hyperspec is copyrighted and licensed in a way where we can't change it at all. It's like the primary source to learn so impossible for anyone knowledgeable to clean-room reverse engineer a new one.

At least in my country you'd be perfectly within your rights to distribute a program that would modify it automatically for every reader who'd want to read a modified version, since as per our copyright act, you're entitled to do pretty much any modifications to the copyrighted works that you possess, as long as you don't redistribute them.

The final draft of the ANSI specification is freely available to use. There's at least one transcription of it available in the public domain[1]

1: https://github.com/phoe/clus-data/tree/master/live/cl

...you're not joking, right? jeeezus

http://clhs.lisp.se/Front/Help.htm#Legal >Permission to copy, distribute, display, and transmit the Common Lisp HyperSpec is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed or displayed or transmitted for direct commercial advantage, that notice is given that copying, distribution, display, and/or transmission is by permission of LispWorks Ltd., and that any copy made is COMPLETE and UNMODIFIED. IN PARTICULAR, the material that MUST appear in the copy includes:

>...

>Permissions related to performance and to creation of derivative works are expressly NOT granted.

>Permission to make modified copies is expressly NOT granted.

>Permission to add or replace any links or any graphical images to any of these pages is expressly NOT granted.

It's one of the most restrictive licences.

> why such ugly colors, ugly typography, bad contrasts, ugly logos, ugly diagrams, ugly supporting graphics

What? It looks perfectly fine on my monochromatic Genera monitor!

Jokes aside, Firefox's reader view makes it only marginally more readable. I wonder if it took the author extra effort to make it look like that, and whether there's a better page sanifier than the reader view.

All of the CSS is handwritten for exactly the intended effect that it gave.

PureScript always sets the bar high for this in my mind, here's an example documentation page: https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-effect/4....

So true! Also, there are no decent UI frameworks for Lisp, so it's impossible to build a full stack app that looks good in a modern browser without adding a TS or JS web component layer. And... There's no modern IDE for Lisp.

I think this aspect of ignoring UIs and aesthetics has seriously held back CL.

That's not true at all, and I'm tempted to write something to prove you wrong.

My aesthetic choices were intentional, and almost nothing in your comment is right.

I'd love read that rebuttal. And I'd ensure that I read it in its gloriously yellow form.

> Also, there are no decent UI frameworks for Lisp

How about CLOG and cl-cffi-gtk?

Ok, thank you for those references I had not seen. CLOG looks like it creates the UI separately and essentially "streams" it to you over a websocket. While novel, that introduces it own problems. Perhaps this why there aren't any working examples that I could find?

The CL library you linked is for connection to GTK, a desktop UI scheme. So, while interesting, that doesn't really help someone who is trying to develop a browser-native app, which is where the world has gone at the moment.

I think Lisp got left behind on the journey, and I think this UI problem is one of the top reasons, the other one being terrible-non-IDE-like-substances.

The CLOG approach is not that novel. It's the same tech that Laravel Livewire, Rails Hotwire and Phoenix Liveview are pioneering. I mentioned GTK because your original comment hadn't mentioned you needed browser-native functionality specifically. For that, you would be well served with CLOG or you can try something like HTMX with a CL backend that serves just HTML.

I wouldn't go as far as to say CL got left behind in the journey, it's still very much alive. But if you want to go with something with more mainstream appeal (not a bad want IMO) there's always Clojure.

Talking about the page behind the link - it's not like Sistine chapel, of course, but it's completely ok. In digital realm your perception is very strongly affected by medium/device/environment. Maybe that's the case. Not commenting about hyperspec though

As someone that has (admittedly minor) struggles with reading and visual processing, I would call the accessibility at least absolutely atrocious.

I don't know if I feel more or less betrayed by the fact that the HTML seems to be more or less bespoke and a screen reader would have no problem with the page, but all of these choices feel all the more intentional.

The page was written to render well if you turn reader view on, and the color schemes are all in one line and easy enough to change. The only thing missing from the reader view is the aside, which is silly and in proper contrast on the original page.

However, the contrast is WCAG AA-conformant (except for the links that aren't in a black box, which aren't important links, as I went out of my way to confirm as I wrote the post). The page is actually pretty accessible.

Accessibility is important to me, as many people I've known in my life have been disabled, but so are silly aesthetic choices.

It was intentional, but it also was well-intentioned. That's why it's readable in more or less every web browser, regardless of whether it supports the one line of CSS I'm using, and accessible to screen readers (although I didn't throw in any elements specifically for them, the page is written simply enough that it should work, intentionally).

The contrast between light blue for links and vibrant yellow for the background is absolutely not okay, I find it almost impossible to read.

Yellow as background can work well, but this is not the way.

I think aesthetics is sometimes equated to "superficiality", "commerciality" even "girlishness" and the surface impression tends to be the polar opposite for niches that really want to distance themselves from anything such. Which is not commendable but there you go.

I don't think you hit the mark at all, as the person who wrote the page. Nothing you note is a bad thing; they're all positives. Superficiality is my specialty.

Your comment kind of shows some biases you might want to work on.

I hardly think I'm wrong just because you don't (think you) fit the bill. I may still be wrong, but it would take more than one single indignant denial to prove.

But I grant that my comment was flippant and OT, potentially ad hominem denigrating even if unintended. I'll try better next time. You on the other hand might try harder to make websites that are readable to ordinary people. Or not.

I think it's fine to accuse people of things, even though I did feel a little sad about it. I don't think the problem is that you broke rules of a web forum, or that you attacked me. I wasn't complaining that you were flippant and off-topic, I was complaining that you think silly web designs are a masculine trait, which is incredibly sexist, as well-intentioned as the sentiment is. Geocities was almost gender-balanced, which included a lot of people of all different kinds of backgrounds making strange-looking web pages. Neocities has more web pages by women than nearly anywhere else on the Internet, and many of those designs aren't to corporate sensibilities, either.

My post is WCAG AA-compliant, except for the very specific occurrence of meaningless social links, and those meaningless social links render well in a browser's 'Reader View'. My site contains no ECMAScript aside from what was necessary to get the toy working. I care deeply about making things accessible; it's important to me.

> you think silly web designs are a masculine trait

So, this seems to be a simple misunderstanding then. Because that's not what I mean (nor wrote). Anyhow, although we can probably continue to debate the finer points of this, I propose we don't. Have a good evening.

Which is really interesting given how male-dominated the web design field is

I assume that was a convoluted way of disagreeing with the attribution of (some) "girlishness" to aesthetics? Suffice to say, the male domination doesn't by itself exclude all (pleasing) aesthetics, except in those niche corners of the internet with the "no girls allowed" sign on. At least maybe, it's really just a theory ;-)

Still better than 3/4 of current web.

i agree. its amazing. yhe hyperspec is unreadable anyway... never really helped me at all

I've spent many hours doing deep dives into the Hyperspec. I have no serious problem with it.